Inexcusable.
That’s the first word that came to mind when I read this article by Ian Urbina in the paper this morning. I hadn’t ever heard of Peggy Cooper Cafritz or her world class art collection or her 15,000 square foot house very near where I went to college in Washington DC, but the fact that it burned to the ground on July 29th, destroying the hundreds of irreplaceable works of art, not knowing many of the facts, I did wonder how the fire got started and why there weren’t better fire control systems in the house.
But the bigger issue around this fire, which was the focus of Urbina’s article, was that there wasn’t enough water pressure in the fire hydrants to put the fire out. The strongest water pressure they had was 323 gallons per minute, which is less than 20% of the amount needed for a fire of this size (1,643), and of course when they went to the second floor, there was even less water pressure. This is, for all practical purposes in the middle of Washington, the Potomac river is so close you could practically smell it from the porch of the house.
While this frustrates me at a micro level that so many great works of art were lost and a beautiful home was destroyed, this was totally avoidable. More importantly, it’s somewhat amazing that insurance companies aren’t all over this issue. Don’t get me wrong, the insurance industry behaves badly in many areas, especially health care. But as I wrote about FM Global on an April 27th blog entry, smart insurance companies should be working harder to know their risk, and at the very least notify their customers about their specific risk profile, and charge them accordingly.
Where am I going with this? As my good friend Lawrence, a volunteer firefighter in Westchester County, New York will tell you firsthand, fire departments need to regularly check the water pressure in fire hydrants, a lower skill, lower risk task often delegated to the volunteers. Whether it’s fire departments or some other independent group, someone should have a database of water pressure at specific fire hydrants so that the risk can be assessed on a per block basis.
And at the risk of stating the obvious, the outcome that everyone would like is to have enough water pressure in hydrants, so firefighters can do their best to minimize fire damage. “How” they go about it is what’s in question here.
This wouldn’t happen overnight, but from where I sit, it’s a relatively straightforward organizational task. So when people go out to a site like zillow.com, for example, to find a home, zillow could add a fire risk overlay on a per block basis, partly as a warning to home buyers, partly to inform insurers, and also to help local governments prioritize where they need to improve water pressure most urgently. Adding quality controls to the process would take some effort, but tougher problems have been solved.
And it would probably be a pretty good little side business for zillow, especially now when home sales are slow.
-Ric